Implementing documentation

This section describes how we approach and implement documentation.

Documentation is a core aspect of our project. We argue that in order to sustain a research software project, it must be documented on different levels, including for users, developers, and maintainers. Additionally, we document decisions we make during the project runtime, in order to enable traceability of decisions, and potentially the extraction of best practices for the sustainable development and provision of research software.

Documentation within the context of the project takes four different forms, or rather, addresses four different target groups:

• Users of the Hexatomic software
• Developers of/contributors to the Hexatomic software
• Maintainers of the Hexatomic software, and of the infrastructure that is developed and implemented to develop and provide it
• The research software community as the large set of people, projects, funders and other stakeholders, etc., which is interested in research software engineering, research software development, the sustainability of research software, research software infrastructure, etc.